Terrorism presents persisting threats to U.S. national security and especially to military operations and personnel conducting these operations abroad in furtherance of national and international security. The new face of combat against a hidden insurgency has led to innovative and deadly use of seemingly benign and hidden objects as weapons. Particularly, fuzing systems and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) present a well-recognized threat to the completion of military objectives and generally to the safety of military personnel and civilians alike. Thus, disruption and elimination of the threat posed by these weapons of terror is a primary focus of modern military operations and national security in general.
In addition, certain commercial applications also present less sinister, but equally serious dangers, such as pyrotechnics, demolitions, and certain mechanical and electronic systems having dangerous components, which are encountered in a variety of applications. Disruption of these objects is also a domestic security concern, especially for law enforcement and individuals laboring in any of many hazardous occupations.
One proposed approach to the elimination of threats posed by such objects is to disrupt a suspect object by applying physical forces sufficient to overwhelm the structural integrity of the object, thus disabling its operative capacity and eliminating threats presented by the object. To date, exemplary disruption systems have employed various methods of generating and applying physical force sufficient to overwhelm the suspect object, including the use of simple explosives, explosively driven water sprays, and sleeves of water and aquarium gravel surrounded by an explosive charge.
While these approaches purport to provide a technical solution to defeating the fuzing systems on various types of explosive devices, operational constraints and performance specifications fail to meet the robust requirements of modern military operations. In particular, solid particulates associated with these approaches are characterized by a plurality of individual low-speed impacts on the target object. Accordingly, these systems may fail to provide a sufficiently robust technical solution capable of defeating fuzing systems on explosive devices.
Therefore, a disruption system which overcomes the shortcomings associated with current approaches to disrupting target objects, and that is capable of delivering an effective dynamic pressure on a target would be beneficial to personal and public safety, and groundbreaking in the fields of law enforcement, counter-terrorism, and specialized hazardous commercial applications.